I struggle to stay present, to keep myself from peering over my shoulder at Ballast, somewhere behind.
Vil rides next to me, his bad mood coiling off him like so much smoke. “Why do you care about him so much?” he asks me shortly.
“I don’t,” I say, but that’s a lie and we both know it. I gnaw on my lip and try to give him a real answer. “We were friends, when we were children. And he saved me. He saved both of us, down in the tunnels. We would be dead a hundred times over, if not for him.”
Vil mutters another curse, and it rankles me.
“I didn’t think I’d ever see him again,” I say quietly.
“Is that supposed to make it better?” Vil demands.
I glance over at him in confusion. “Supposed to makewhatbetter?”
He clenches his jaw. “You didn’t think you’d ever see him again. So you settled for me. But now that he’s here, you have no more use for me, do you?”
“Usefor you?” I nearly shout.
Lysandra looks back from her place ahead of us and frowns at my raised voice.
I take long, slow breaths, trying to calm the confused rage pounding behind my temples.
“That isn’t it at all, Vil,” I say then. I can’t quite look at him, so I study his hands, knuckles tight about his reins. “I swear.”
He huffs in disbelief. “Then what is it?”
My heart pulses overloud in my ears, and I fight the urge to glance behind me and find Ballast among the erratic torchlight, desperately wanting to assure myself he’s really there.
“I was shocked to see him. It doesn’t mean anything beyond that.”
“Then you don’t have feelings for him?”
I’m startled into looking at Vil, the torchlight gleaming on his dark skin.
“Do you have feelings for him?”
Anger stirs behind my breastbone at Vil’s arrogant assumption he has the right to ask me such a question. “We have a mission to complete,” I tell him tightly. “I don’t have time for feelings.”
I’ve hurt him, now, but no part of me wishes to rescind my words, to soothe his ego and assure him that any feelings I do have are for him. Because that isn’t true. I thought I had found family in Vil, safety and security. It was a nice dream. But that’s all it was. A dream.
We don’t speak for the remainder of the half hour it takes to reach the mines, which lie north and a little west of Tenebris. I don’t know what I was expecting, but the vastness of them staggers me, acres upon acres of digging sites, with tunnels spaced out at regular intervals. Menand women swarm like ants, coming in and out of the mine shafts, hauling carts heaped with ore. Hundreds of torches illuminate the dark; the smoke stings my eyes and makes me cough into my sleeve.
Lord Damianus, the overseer, leads us down into one of the shafts, where a massive main chamber branches out into a dozen winding tunnels. Metal cart tracks lead into each tunnel, and the mine is lit with more of those lamps that seem to have no fuel source.
A worker comes out of one of the tunnels, pushing a cart along the tracks, and he comes to a startled halt at the sight of us. He looks young, no older than me, but his eyes are haunted.
“Carry on,” snaps Lord Damianus, and the young man bows and trundles his cart past us.
The overseer then launches into a detailed explanation of the types of ore mined in these fields and the amounts garnered each year. Despite the careful distance Vil has put between us since we arrived, I can tell he’s impressed, and that Daeros is even richer than he thought. I wonder if he’s already calculating exactly what to do with it all, once he sits crowned in Tenebris. He is more than capable of making Daeros flourish, but for the first time I wonder if Saga’s accusation is true, if what he really wants is the power he was denied upon her return, and the plot to annex Daeros is his way of getting it.
Our group, for the most part, keeps silent. I can’t help but look for Ballast; he stands a little apart from the rest of us, tense and wary, like he’s ready to bolt for the exit if he needs to. I try to catch his eye, but he doesn’t seem to notice.
“You should set Ballast to work here, Father,” says Theron when Lord Damianus pauses for breath. “He could compel the rats and worms to dig, and you’d have no need for other men.”
Alcaeus and Zopyros laugh at this, while Lysandra stands fidgeting with her sleeve, like she fears the joke might soon be turned on her. I want to tear all their stupid heads off.
Ballast grows very still, but he makes no answer.
Kallias gives him a feline smile. “Would you set bird and beast to work for me, boy?”
